Familiar Strangers and “Location-Aware” Social Networking

It’s curious to me that, due to rapid technological advancements, our capacity for social networking is expanding beyond our space and time limitations. Joe McCarthy in his recent post entitled Familiar Strangers in India, reflects on a story he heard on NPR Sunday Edition called, Life in India: Dawn on Parsee Gulli.

Joe points to similarities in the story on a project he worked on at Intel, Familiar Strangers, which was based on ground-breaking work on the subject by Stanley Milgram in 1972. In Intel's project, they designed a wearable, wireless radio beacon to capture and extend the "familiar stranger" relationships, based on the MicaDot2 Mote, a predecessor to Smart Dust. Though there are lots of privacy concerns using this technology, it's just a matter of time before these types of devices become commonplace.

The integration of "location-aware" and short-range wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, and online, real-time access to information about one's social network (like LinkedIn or Orkut) and familiar strangers, will enable all kinds of interaction between people, from entertainment, such as digital street game, to impromptu business meetings. Intel's Jabberwocky software for MIDP 2.0-compatible phones with Java J2ME support, enables familiar strangers to recognize each other when chance encounters occur. Services such as Dodgeball allows for your current location to be announced to your "friends" and "friends of friends" that happen to be nearby, as long as you live in the 10 cities currently supported by Dodgeball.

Sean Savage writes about his project, Encounter Bubbles, which aims to graphical visualize one's encounters with people and places over time.

All of these ideas and projects are converging, adding new social, spatial and time dimensions to how conversations occur and relationships develop.